Who Needs Creative Directors?

In a world where content is king, can a magazine editor replace a creative director? Andrew Rosen, chief executive of Theory and of Helmut Lang, thinks so.

By using Helmut Lang — the minimalist label that helped define the 1990s, and that was reinvented as a contemporary brand when its founder left and the Prada Group sold it in 2006 to Fast Retailing, where Mr. Rosen is a group senior vice president — he is putting his, well, theory, into action.

Instead of naming a designer to the brand’s top creative spot (as creative director, artistic director, chief creative officer or any of the other titles that have come to be synonymous with “designer”), Mr. Rosen has named Isabella Burley, editor of the British youth culture magazine Dazed & Confused, to the new post of “editor in residence.”

Huh?

“It’s exactly what it sounds like,” Mr. Rosen said by telephone from Tokyo. In effect, Ms. Burley will be in charge of all creative aspects of the brand, from digital content to working with the in-house design team and engaging in a variety of “special projects” with collaborators, the first of whom will be Shayne Oliver, founder of Hood by Air. Which sounds a lot like the job of a … creative director.

But no, Mr. Rosen said, “I don’t see this as a creative director at all.”

“Creative directors come and go,” he said, in a direct reference to the current, and seemingly endless, round of designer musical chairs now roiling fashion, and the increasing lack of loyalty on the part of designers and their corporate kin. “This gives me more flexibility.”

Which is another way of saying it makes him less dependent on a named designer. Instead, he can work with all and be attached to none.

“I’m interested in the idea of multiple voices,” Mr. Rosen said. “Why stay with the status quo? I believe there are opportunities to do things outside the system.”

Helmut Lang — a brand with a history of changing things, including moving its show to New York from Europe, and then moving that show from the end of the season to the beginning — “gives us the permission to be innovative,” he added.

Mr. Rosen said he began to feel that the old model was not working in 2014, when the creative directors at the time, Nicole and Michael Colovos, departed and he began rethinking his options. He was introduced to Ms. Burley through Brian Phillips, founder of the New York-based image-management hub Black Frame. Mr. Rosen liked her connection to readers, and to the next generation — which is to say, those elusive consumers known as millennials.

To this end, she is staying in London, and at her magazine job, and coming once a month or so to work with the Helmut Lang team in New York, and other buzzy people she wants to bring into the fold. Mr. Oliver is the first.

Indeed, the dual choices of Ms. Burley and Mr. Oliver seem an unabashed bid to make Helmut Lang both younger and cooler.

It is also, however, an unexpected approach for a brand in the contemporary space, a market based on the idea of accessibility of both price and aesthetic. “Cool,” after all, is by definition a niche concept: Once a cool product is widely embraced, it’s usually no longer cool.

Mr. Oliver, for his part, is known for being something of an urban provocateur, thanks to his in-your-face, “post-gender” streetwear. Though Hood by Air received a special prize in the 2014 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers competition and the next year won the Swarovski Award for Men’s Wear at the CFDA Awards, he is largely a fashion world phenomenon, and not necessarily that well known outside it.

“Is Shayne only Hood by Air?” Mr. Rosen asked. “Just because he does one thing at his brand doesn’t mean he has to do the same thing at Helmut Lang.”

Mr. Oliver’s “special project” — a one-off for both men and women — will be unveiled in September and will go on sale around November or December. It will be followed by other collaborations that will exist alongside the more standard Helmut Lang offerings designed by the brand’s team.

As it happens, this sort of reinventing-the-system strategy has been tried before, albeit in different ways. In 2016 Brioni made a big deal about thinking out of the box when it came to choosing a new creative director, naming Justin O’Shea, a former buying director, to the post. He lasted a whole six months.

In 2013, Diego Della Valle conceived Schiaparelli as a similar “creative factory” venture: a brand with “guest stars” that would design special collections once a year alongside a creative director. His first collaborator was Christian Lacroix, and that idea lasted … about a year. So he returned to the traditional model with Marco Zanini as creative director (Mr. Zanini has since left the brand and has been replaced by Bertrand Guyon).

The risk of such a strategy is that engaging many different, powerful voices, with different perspectives on a brand will create not just newness but also confusion. Instead of engaging consumers, it will alienate them.

“That’s the editor’s job!” Mr. Rosen said. “To control the message and keep it focused, the way you do in a magazine.” The bada bing bada boom was implied.